The other night we went to a book party for the Onion’s new Atlas. It was at the Explorer’s Club on the Upper East Side, which is the kind of place where once, 100 years ago, deep-tanned adventurers returned from the Alps and spoke to a roomful of wealthy, obese, white-haired Victorian matrons about visions of Kilimanjaro, incidents with snakes, and snowstorms set off with the raising of a finger. On the cab ride home, I realized I didn’t have any money, so I asked the cab driver to take my phone in hawk and let me pay him the next day. He said he would take me to jail. The prospect of a night in jail, seen through the prism of recent events, really didn’t seem to be much at all. So I said, honestly, “OK, let’s do that.” He became very frustrated and took the SIM card out of my phone. “You’re very drunk, aren’t you?” he said. I told him I was. He gave me my SIM card and I went up to my apartment. There was a knock at my window. I wish I could say he was returning my phone, but he wasn’t. He had come to suggest another arrangement. You can deduce it. I closed and locked the door. In the morning I read this one-liner in the book, under the entry for Djibouti: “Congratulations, you just laughed about thousands of starving people.” The book’s really sumptuously printed and filled with tons of little factoids like a real atlas, except they’re all zingers. Some of them are a little wokka wokka, but there are so many crammed on each page it manages to encompass every wavelength on the visible spectrum of funny.